There has been a growing proliferation of high-speed input/output interface standards (i.e., agreed principles and protocols) directed towards various applications within the electronics industry. These standards generally address chip-to-chip interfaces, board-to-board interfaces, and box-to-box interfaces for a wide range of emerging applications, such as data packet processing, data bus bridges, and high-speed memory interfacing, to name but a few.
Certain programmable devices (or chips), such as programmable logic devices (e.g., including complex programmable logic devices and field programmable gate arrays) can potentially handle a wide range of input/output interface standards because of their flexible programmable circuitry. Specifically, the core logic of the programmable device may be programmed to accommodate the desired input/output standards by performing the necessary logic. In contrast, other types of devices that have fixed-functions or non-scalable interfaces (e.g., a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) interface) are typically limited to the set of input/output standards that the circuitry was specifically designed (i.e., hard-wired) to accommodate.
A drawback of programmable devices is that their performance is generally limited due to the nature of their flexible, programmable circuitry. For example, a signal propagating through programmable circuitry will typically take longer than through circuitry specifically designed for the desired function or application. Consequently, programmable devices are more suited to medium-frequency logic and interface applications than the emerging high-speed input/output interface applications. As a result, there is a need for systems and methods to address the high-speed input/output interface for programmable devices.